Brewster County
On Saturday, well over 200 people from across the Big Bend region turned out to protest the Trump administration as part of one of the largest single-day protests in American history. Millions of folks from across the country took to the streets for the second edition of the “No Kings” protest, which takes aim at what the organizers believe is a pattern of executive overreach on the part of President Trump.
Alpine was the largest local protest, drawing a crowd of around 200. They marched through downtown and then met at the courthouse lawn for a rally, holding signs festooned with a variety of pro-immigrant, pro-LGBTQ and anti-fascist rhetoric. Some nixed the political messaging altogether and expressed a deep sense of exhaustion after a year of what has felt to many like nonstop violence and controversy. “I knew it would be bad, but holy sh–t,” one woman’s sign read.
Back in September, Trump issued an executive order declaring Antifa (an abbreviation of “anti-fascist”) a domestic terrorist organization—despite the fact that Antifa is not an organization at all but rather a philosophy shared by many left-wing groups. “Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law,” the order reads to the contrary. “It uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals.”
Right-wing news outlets have spent much of 2025 proliferating images of clashes between police and protestors, but those images don’t reflect raw numbers about the two No Kings Day events held this year. At Saturday’s event, larger cities reported little trouble, and downtown Austin’s No Kings crowd of 20,000 resulted in a whopping zero arrests.
Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson reported that he also made no arrests on Saturday. The last No King’s rally in Alpine back in June ended in an arrest, and afterwards, both law enforcement and protestors criticized each other’s conduct. Officers were not in contact with organizers before the event and were unsure of what to expect—later, they reported being heckled and called names by the crowd. Many folks on the ground, meanwhile, felt that law enforcement wasn’t doing enough to protect them from a vehicle that they claimed drove by repeatedly and swerved dangerously close.
Dodson said the driver of that vehicle was later served with a citation. The case of Craig Campbell—a part-time Alpine resident arrested for allegedly striking a passenger concealed in the bed of the truck with his protest sign—is still in limbo, though Campbell’s legal representation maintains that he didn’t intend to hurt anyone.
For Dodson, the second time was the charm. A lone counter-protestor offered his thoughts from the stoop of a local business, but no passers-by clashed with the marchers. He placed officers strategically to try to nip any brewing conflicts in the bud. “There weren’t any incidents, other than people honking or throwing the finger or something, but it was nothing noteworthy,” he said.
Down in Terlingua, around two dozen folks and two dogs gathered in the morning to beat the heat. They met up at the Y-intersection in Study Butte with their signs and—in true Terlingua fashion—their hula hoops. While their sentiments overlapped with those expressed in Alpine, many of the Study Butte protesters tipped their caps a few miles down the road toward Big Bend National Park, in solidarity with personnel laid off earlier this year and currently furloughed as part of the extended government shutdown.
As the scheduled end of the rally neared, a local heavy equipment operator showed up with a tractor that’d he’d festooned with slogans. “We’re the most redneck ‘No Kings’ in the country!” someone exclaimed.
The mood was so bright and cheerful it was easy to forget the online firestorm that had preceded the event. Bernadette Devine, a local of more than 30 years, had posted on a handful of local Facebook groups, letting folks know about the gathering and reminding them to bring sunscreen and hats. It felt relatively innocuous—but the posts garnered hundreds of angry comments, some wishing doxing and death upon the protesters. Many part-time landowners decried the “California liberals” who had polluted Terlingua and turned it into something they didn’t recognize. (It got so bad that the post on a group called “Our Terlingua” was deleted by the moderator, who later issued a total ban on any content that was even vaguely political.) “I thought about engaging myself, but there’s no changing hearts and minds on Facebook,” Devine said.
The overall sentiment was that the protest would have been bigger without the threats—practically everyone there knew someone who would have come but was scared to make an appearance. A handful of veteran protesters in the crowd knew that it was a grim truth that came with exercising the right to free speech.
Adrienne Evans, another longtime local, has an equally long history of activism, much of it dedicated to what she feels is a draconian and inhumane immigration system. Evans’ sign read: “Our Neigh-bears are from Mexico,” a pun referencing the famous Big Bend black bears, who were hunted out of the United States in the late 20th century and returned on their own from Mexico in the ‘90s to repopulate the Chisos Mountains.
She hoped the sign would remind people that her people are binational and bilingual—and stronger together, though they’ve been separated in the past 200 years by increasingly strict border policy. “We’re one of the oldest living communities along the Rio Grande, and you think politics are going to stop us from being a community?” she wondered aloud. “I believe that anti-immigrant sentiment is just a way for politicians to get elected, and I’m worried about who they’re going to turn on next.”
Evans urged folks to get involved—if not for themselves, for their children and grandchildren. “We want to still have hope for our children because we can’t raise children without hope,” she said. “Having a protest is a way to maintain hope.”
